


Melodious

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Established Relationship, Fluff, Lazy Mornings, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 18:09:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4189827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a rather blurry boundary between sleeping and waking these days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Melodious

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt _happiness_ at [Roy/Ed Week](http://royedweek.tumblr.com)! ♥
> 
> I titled this document "Roy/Ed Fluffball". Consider yourselves warned. >:|
> 
> My other collected warnings on LJ were as follows, since I think they're relevant enough to repeat:  
>  _fluff. like. really.; some kind of post-BH AU, probably; saucy bois; have I edited this AT ALL? you'll NEVER KNOW_
> 
> ~~ I'm not caffeine crashing; YOU'RE caffeine crashing ~~

Roy’s waking brain has acclimated to the greatest stroke of luck ever experienced by a sad little mortal being—it almost never surprises him, anymore, to see lights on inside when he reaches the house; to be greeted with a rib-cracking, chest-crushing, breath-stealing hug, half-warmth, half-steel, the moment he sets foot over the threshold—but sometimes his somnolent mind takes a moment to catch up.

He supposes that makes sense—it’s extremely difficult to tell this reality apart from dreaming, after all.

As his eyelids lift, and he focuses on the morning light spilt like melted butter on the pillowcase, he registers that it is Saturday.  He registers that he is neither hungover nor still intoxicated from the night before—that there doesn’t seem to be anything untoward in his system whatsoever, actually—and that there is a warm body in the bed beside him.

Well.  Half-warm, half-steel.

He wonders if a morning may come where the mere revelation doesn’t make him smile.  He hopes not.

In a rather typical gesture of unconventional courtesy, Ed has taken to coming to bed with Roy every night; allowing himself to be cuddled, coddled, nuzzled, and generally treated like a teddy bear (which he _unequivocally_ enjoys, though he wouldn’t admit as much on pain of death); and then lying awake ruminating on the evening’s chemical equations, alchemical arcana, or university politics until he gets as tired as his long-since-passed-out bedmate.  Many people think Ed is unobservant—or, at the very least, oblivious to the subtleties of other human beings.  The spectacularly unsuccessful trajectory of Roy’s early attempts to romance him speak somewhat to the point, but it’s not quite that simple—the motivations and the machinations of others, particularly those with ulterior and/or unsavory agendas, do indeed put Ed’s doggedly logical and perilously pure thought process into a tailspin; that much is true.  But at a basic level, he understands people just fine.  He understands when people have been hurt, and when they’re hiding it; he has a knack for knowing when to prod at wounds until they reveal the cause instead of just the symptoms, and also when to back away and leave an open sore untested.

Roy hadn’t ever said anything: Ed watched the circles underneath his eyes deepen slightly, watched a perfectly contented sort of resignation settle in, and realized, all on his own, that crawling into the bed at two in the morning was disrupting Roy’s already less-than-smooth attempts at sleep.

Roy has met people who believe that Ed’s brashness means he’s not compassionate.  He has met people who think that anyone who acts the cheeky little shit on the surface must be rotten and self-centered straight through.  He has met people who honestly subscribe to the notion that Ed manipulated his way up in the military, then leveraged it to gain favor at the university—that he’s supremely unqualified for anything he’s undertaken, but a master of playing the game.

Come to think of it, Roy has met quite a lot of idiots.

Sometimes he’s one of them, but never—he hopes, oh, _God_ , he hopes—where it comes to Ed.

As quietly as possible, he lifts his hand and reaches over to run his fingers very gently through the indescribably beautiful fall of Ed’s hair, loosed from its confines to tumble over his shoulders as he slept.  He always starts out lying on his back and then rolls over sometime during the night—the better, Roy supposes, to bury his face in the pillow and disregard as much of the world as possible until it’s tragically necessary to get up.

A few of the waves and tangles part like water around Roy’s fingertips.  He sets the pad of his thumb at the nape of Ed’s neck, rubs gently for a second at the immensity of tension held in the tendons there, and then starts to walk his first two fingers slowly down the vertebrae of Ed’s spine—a reverent connoisseur of their music, but no maestro; trailing his hands across the piano keys like a light touch might release their magic, like coaxing out a shiver could reveal the mystery all at once.

How did he end up here?

How did he _ever_ get so lucky?

He pauses, diverting his fingers from their path to let them dally along the sharp angles of Ed’s shoulder-blade, then glides them over to trace the dark scar tissue around the metal on the right.  He knows its shapes now—knows every peak and valley, every gradient of pink and white and red; every contour, every line.  If his mouth could heal—if any part of him was _good_ , was decent, was noble like the man lying next to him—

Well.

He grazes his fingertips downward along Ed’s spine until he hits the elastic at the top hem of Ed’s boxers.  It would be rather delightful to wake him by shoving a hand down his pants—to rouse him by _a_ rousing him, in a manner of speaking.

Then again… Saturday mornings are often best spent as lazily as humanly possible.  Sex can wait.  At least another hour.

He flattens his palm on the small of Ed’s back, soaking in the heat for a moment before stroking his hand back upward along the arch of Ed’s spine.

Just as he reaches the ridges of Ed’s ribs, one gold eye opens just a sliver and fixes its gaze on him.

“Good morning, beautiful,” he says.

The eye blinks.

“Ah, the strong, silent type,” Roy says.  “One of my favorites.”

The eye narrows.

“B’n watchin’ me sleep again?” Ed mumbles, mostly into the pillow.

Roy twirls a lock of hair around his index finger.  With a thousand and ten years to squander, he would never tire of this.  “You have such a talent for making my disturbing gestures sound touchingly romantic.”

Ed snickers, and the light of the laughter in that one visible eye is…

Well.  Worth all of it.

“S’your own fault,” Ed says.

That’s not entirely true, but Roy can hardly come out with _Would you believe that you’re the only person I have ever loved so wholly that I simply cannot get enough of you no matter how much time goes by?_ first thing in the morning.  Ed might short-circuit, and that would be a bit inconvenient.

“It usually is,” he says instead.

Ed makes an affirmative-sounding noise into the pillow, and his eye slides shut again.  Roy extends one hand to scratch his fingernails gently at Ed’s scalp at the back of his skull, where the ponytail usually pulls the most.  Ed very nearly _purrs_.

“Shall I make it up to you?” Roy asks.

“B’con,” Ed mumbles.

“I was thinking of something else,” Roy says.

Ed’s eyelid parts again, and an unseen scowl angles his eyebrow downward.

“B’con,” he says.

“Bacon it is,” Roy says.

He scratches a little harder.  Ed’s eye slides shut again, and he makes a soft, soft, perfectly contented sound into the down of the pillow.

“’Mornin’, Roy” follows next, and the peaks and valleys of last week and the prospective pitfalls of the next have never felt further off.  At this moment, this— _Ed_ , pliant and drowsy and sweet—is what he has, is _all_ he has, and he cannot for the life of him think of an improvement.

Well—other than bacon, possibly.


End file.
